Andromeda Galactic CTO Speaking in Kansas City, Missouri
Martine Dowden will be presenting "Moving Beyond Pretty" and "Kiss My Sass."

Andromeda Galactic Founder and CTO Martine Dowden will be speaking at the Kansas City Developer Conference, or KCDC, this year. First, she will be giving her talk, Kiss My Sass, on Monday, August 8th at 11:15 AM Central. In this talk, she asks if users are really using Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets, or Sass, to its fullest. We know about variables, and nesting properties is nice, but what else can it do for us? She will go over some of the more advanced features Sass provides, what their benefits are, and more. Then, she will be presenting Moving Beyond Pretty: Making deliberate design choices later that day at 2:30 PM Central. Moving Beyond Pretty takes a look at design in terms of purpose, goal, and usability. The talk will delve into the psychology, physiology, and mathematics of design principles for three key purposes: making conscious design choices, improving user experience, and accessibility dos and don’ts. The conference will be running from August 8th through August 10th, 2022 at the Kansas City Convention Center in downtown Kansas City, Mo.

An award winning CTO, UX / UI designer & developer, international speaker, and author, Martine focuses on web interfaces that are beautiful, functional, accessible, and usable. She approaches user experience from both art and science, drawing from her degrees in psychology and visual communications. She has worked as a developer, artist, educator, and consultant since 2005. In 2015, she published a children's book, Programming Languages ABC++, and in 2016 the Workbook Edition sold over 20,000 copies. Shen then went on to write Approachable Accessibility: Planning for Success which was released in June 2019 and Architecting CSS: The Programmer’s Guide to Effective Stylesheets in 2020. Currently, she is the CTO at Andromeda Galactic Solutions where she continues work on and share her passion for front end development.